106 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015
"Catastrophe" 's dirty jokes are told so gracefully they feel elegant.
ON TELEVISION
BE MINE
The rise of the bite-sized romantic comedy.
BY EMILY NUSSBAUM
ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR
To qualify as watchable, a roman-
tic comedy, in the movies, doesn't
have to be much good. Do the
friends have chemistry? Is there
a montage celebrating the joys of play-
ing hooky in Los Angeles, New York,
or London? Does Elvis Costello sing
"She"? Fine, I'll rent it. Much of my
fondness for the inconsistent but very
funny Fox sitcom "The
Mindy Project" was that
its creator and star, Mindy
Kaling, clearly graded on
the same curve. In her net-
work-TV lab, Kaling sam-
pled rom-coms like a mas-
ter, splicing their rhythms
into sitcom beats, pumping
rude energy into Hollywood
formula.The show got tiny
ratings, was axed by Fox, and
will now air its upcoming
season on Hulu. Truth is,
there should be public fund-
ing for such valuable labors.
Kaling was a bit of a pi-
oneer: she took the soul-
mate narrative---the subtle
heart of ensemble friend-
ship sitcoms like her first
show, "The O ce"---and
made it brazen and up-
front. But "The Mindy Proj-
ect"is now one ofa wave of
similar experiments, many
o the beaten track: Ama-
zon's lovely "Catastrophe";
the sleeper rom-com "Scro-
tal Recall," on Netflix; and
the sparkling "You're the
Worst," which is currently
entering its second season, on FXX,
after a near-perfect first. These shows
are a sharp and likable crowd, unafraid
of fun and pleasure, like friends of
friends at a party you're glad you showed
up for. In contrast to Hollywood's rom-
coms---whose pleasures often feel like
"settling"---their TV analogues have a
romanticism that is at once earnest and
earned. They're unphony about sex.
They're legitimately funny. They pro-
vide a helpful blueprint for any Amer-
ican planning to sleep with a Brit. It
doesn't hurt that they have short sea-
sons: you can binge-watch these shows
without losing your week.
The standout is "Catastrophe," whose
niftily compressed first season is six ep-
isodes and out. (It's been picked up for
a second season, which can't arrive soon
enough.) Written by and starring Rob
Delaney and Sharon Horgan, "Catastro-
phe" is the story of an American adver-
tising executive, Rob, who goes on a busi-
ness trip to London, where he buys a
drink for Sharon, an Irish schoolteacher.
They're both around forty.Their chem-
istry is nuclear. Five minutes in, they're
tossing dinner plates into walls and
doing it in his hotel room---a scene that,
like many of the sex scenes in these
shows, is at once da y and unapolo-
getically hot.Then they do it again, and
again, with breaks for co ee and tour-
ism, until he flies home. The next time
they speak, she's pregnant.
It's a simple premise, but the show
is appealingly relaxed about seeing it
through. The non-couple decide to try
to make things work. He moves to
England. He proposes, which she finds
ridiculous. She has medical complica-
tions: one of the funniest scenes involves
a gynecologist who keeps saying "can-
cer," over and over. Sharon
has a strange brother and is
friends with a terrible mar-
ried couple. Rob has almost
no friends, other than a
finance-guy acquaintance.
That's basically it, but each
episode intensifies, emotion-
ally, suggesting the long arc
of a story that's just begin-
ning. In an era when TV
comedies are often framed
by voice-overs or mocku-
mentary elements, "Ca-
tastrophe" is filmed like an
independent movie: shaky-
cams, tinkly music over
montages, overlapping ban-
ter. This style can be its
own coy conceit, but here
it feels uncontrived, in large
part because the show's
crass, often filthy jokes are
delivered so adroitly they feel
elegant instead of juvenile.
Crucially, it's impossible
not to have a crush on both
members of the couple.
He's red-faced and hairy,
but graceful, like an elk in
khakis. Eyes narrowed with
a reflexive suspicion, she
spins her lines like batons, lending even
the coarsest remark---"I shouldn't have
called her a cunt; she's more of a bitch,"
say---the bite of a Noël Coward witti-
cism.There hasn't been such a grownup
pair of lovers on television since the
wonderful Canadian show "Slings and
Arrows"---these two make chagrin and